The World the Civil War Made

Introduction

Echoes of War: Rethinking Post–Civil War Governance and Politics

Gregory P. Downs and Kate Masur

As the final Confederate armies surrendered in May 1865, the nation’s interior secretary saw the Civil War’s consequences in far-off New Mexico, where the law abolishing slavery was disregarded and the practice of selling Indian children still continues. When President Andrew Johnson extended national authority over the rebel states in June, he issued an executive order directing federal officials in New Mexico to end the barbarous and inhuman practice of selling captives. The seemingly southern problems of slavery, emancipation, and the defense of federal authority spread far beyond regional boundaries into New Mexico and other places. Throughout the United States, and in some ways around the world, it was clear that a civil war begun in South Carolina and primarily fought east of the Mississippi River had in fact changed politics, policy, and personal life across a much broader canvass. If New Mexican peonage was not, of course, the war’s cause, the struggle to destroy it was, in fact, one of the war’s consequences. The postwar era tested the reach and authority of the national government over its own territory, and it also brought forward a multitude of challenges to emerging visions of freedom and citizenship. Just as an observer in the South could trace the war’s impact in black children singing John Brown’s Body within sight of John Calhoun’s grave, or in the sixty-five white men who dragged the freedman Abram Colby and his daughter from their Georgia house, or in freedpeople like Bella Newton who took white men to court to assert newfound rights, so too could people much farther away see the changes the war had brought. In Wisconsin, stray bands of Ho-Chunk Indians, separated from their self-governing tribe and living among white settlers, insisted that they too shared in the newfound constitutional rights the Civil War made. On the floor of the Senate, Democrats and Republicans took those claims seriously, debating whether the logics of war and emancipation had transformed the status not just of freedpeople but of all people who lived under U.S. sovereignty.

Few captured the kaleidoscopic impact of the war better than Ely Parker, a Seneca man who was a wartime general and later became the first Native American to serve as an Indian affairs commissioner. His ambitions had drawn him to the center of the canonical Civil War. As Lt. General Ulysses Grant’s aide, he wrote the final copy of the surrender agreement at Appomattox Court House in April 1865. In short order, however, Parker was spinning with the war’s consequences across the national landscape. In 1866 at Fort Smith, Arkansas, Parker helped negotiate a treaty with pro-Confederate tribes requiring them to emancipate their slaves and accept increased federal jurisdiction over their affairs. The next year, as he tried to settle the conflict in the Great Plains, he connected South and West, freedman, rebel, Indian, and settler, and envisioned expanded military regulation of the nation’s uneasy peripheries. The war’s consequences spun farther afield. Across the Atlantic Ocean, Karl Marx saw the first fruits of the war in an urban movement for an eight-hour day. The American Civil War, with its attack on the right of white southerners to hold people of African descent as property, had breathed new life into Marx’s vision of social revolution. In the United States, as attention turned from the end of slavery to the problem of enduring racial inequality, the bright line between North and South faded. Within a few years, black petitioners from Albany and Brooklyn would join the antislavery icon Charles Sumner and the black congressman Richard Harvey Cain in pressing for an expansive vision of civil rights that included equal access to restaurants, hotels, and theaters.

In this volume we consider some of the ways the Civil War echoed beyond 1865 in a dynamic, crucial postwar period whose contours have often proven difficult to capture.¹ The essays collected here explore several different regions of the United States and the circulation of ideas throughout the nation and the world. Our goal is to do more than just tell new stories. In juxtaposing ostensibly distinct regional stories and approaches to history, we hope to suggest new framing questions and modes of analysis. Rather than presuming that Reconstruction is the best framework for understanding the postwar period—and thus envisioning a Reconstruction of the West or the Plains or the world—in this volume we ask whether thinking across regions might in fact might help us understand not just the regions themselves but the entire nation and its place in nineteenth-century history.²

Crucial to this expansive reimagining of the war’s consequences are new ways of understanding the size and particular strengths of what we call the Stockade State. Historians have long trained their attention on the extensive and intricate changes in federal policy that characterized the postwar moment. Yet much remains to be learned about practices of governance. The essays in this volume do not assume that the federal government was capable of enforcing the liberal principles to which it had committed or of bringing people and institutions to heel when it wanted. Rather, they ask precisely how the changes that rippled out from the Civil War did—and did not—echo in people’s lives and communities. They portray a federal government located in outposts, often beset and besieged, able to enforce its policies in concentrated areas but hard pressed to extend its sovereignty throughout the land. Instead of a nation defined by shared assumptions about democratic processes and peaceful governance, these essays portray a place convulsed by violence and a government stymied by common people’s stubborn assertions of power and prerogative. They invite us to envision the enduringly illiberal and chaotic qualities of life in the postwar United States not as imperfections in a consolidating liberal nation, but as central to the American experience. In this context they revisit the enduring question: How did the Civil War, often considered the pivot of American history, change the nation?

THE PERIOD FORMERLY KNOWN AS RECONSTRUCTION

For historians of the U.S. South, the framework for answering that question has long been clear. Reconstruction was both a period and a process, a tumultuous fight over the future of the eleven states that had left the United States in 1861, declared themselves a separate nation, and waged a four-year war for independence. In the fight that became known as Reconstruction, congressional Republicans tried to modify President Abraham Lincoln’s early experiments in wartime restoration and then rejected President Johnson’s program, refusing to accept the representatives those eleven states sent to Washington in the winter of 1865–66. What followed was an outpouring of Republican-led policymaking that increased the federal government’s power vis-à-vis the states and had the potential to change how common people understood themselves in relation to the nation. Historians have long recognized that Washington, D.C., was just one of many centers of action during Reconstruction. Indeed, since W. E. B. Du Bois’s canonical Black Reconstruction (1935), and especially since the 1960s, most studies of Reconstruction have emphasized ground-level struggles over political power and the organization of labor.³ As political pleas brought the South to Washington, and as laws and directives pushed outward from the capital into the countryside, white and black southerners struggled to define the contours of freedom in a postwar world. As conventionally understood, then, Reconstruction refers to the dynamic period of political debate and social upheaval in the South that followed the Civil War.

In our own era, the idea of Reconstruction retains its power and its allure. The term is now used more boldly and broadly than ever before, surfacing in studies of other regions and in other disciplines. Linking transformations in the South with those in the North and West, scholars have recently posited a Reconstruction of the North or—in Elliott West’s justly influential analysis—a Greater Reconstruction of the nation, defined as the project of incorporating western territories that the United States obtained in the war with Mexico. Others have gone even further, suggesting the reconstruction of white southern womanhood, race, critical social theory, religion, southern law, southern debtors, American liberalism, Mark Twain, American popular politics, and many other topics. The appeal is understandable. Scholars’ multifaceted use of reconstruction implicitly recognizes the convergence of a particular problem—the struggle over how the rebel states would rejoin the nation—with the broader and more general phenomena the term implies: crisis, rebuilding, and historical change itself.

For precisely these reasons, however, we have become persuaded that Reconstruction is not the most useful framework for making sense of the many histories of the postwar United States. When historians stretch the concept of Reconstruction to cover the conquest of western land, changing racial dynamics in the North, or the rise of industrial capitalism, the term becomes metaphorical rather than descriptive, emptied of its core meaning. It alludes to everything and nothing. At the same time, such broad uses diminish the specificity of the conventional Reconstruction story, making it more difficult for historians of the South or of federal policy to convey its stakes or significance.

Moreover, when historians frame their analysis around Reconstruction, they tend to foreground certain phenomena while eclipsing others. The concept of Reconstruction carries with it assumptions about the nature of federal power, the relation of region to center, and the stakes of history writing that may inhibit our ability to understand the nineteenth-century United States. Works begun within the framework of Reconstruction tend to move steadily toward a familiar story line of extension and retreat, possibility and disappointment. That narrative reminds us of the importance of the era, both for contemporaries and for our own understandings of the nation in general and the legacies of slavery in particular. Yet that story line may also preclude us from considering postwar history from different angles, from conceiving of this crucial period as something other than three artificially separated textbook topics: Reconstruction, the Gilded Age, and the West.

Because we want to think our way out of some of the frameworks—ideological, regional, and otherwise—that have defined the historical literature, we decided to sidestep Reconstruction as a structure and a keyword for this volume. We called the project The World the War Made to emphasize our desire to move away from the assumption that the era can be encapsulated as some version of Reconstruction. We urged the essays’ authors to think around that conventional term and to examine the period, in its various complexities, as a postwar moment. Our hope, then, is to consider anew the impact on the nation of a war that cost more than 700,000 lives and 4 billion dollars and freed 4 million slaves from bondage. Perhaps our proposed nomenclature will also help shed presumptions of American exceptionalism that remain embedded in the Reconstruction framework, however much scholars have tried to think broadly and comparatively about the war’s end.

Our volume’s title is also, however, a nod to the opening chapter of the greatest single work on Reconstruction, Eric Foner’s Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution.⁴ A quarter century after its publication, Foner’s Reconstruction remains both the standard study of the field and one of the finest works of American history ever written. Although subsequent scholars have produced groundbreaking books on black political organizing, southern labor relations, freedpeople’s nationalist visions, the remaking of gender relationships, and many other topics, Foner’s synthesis continues to set the standard for interpretations of the era. Indeed, historians of the postwar United States almost inevitably draw on Foner’s scholarship, particularly on his ambitious vision of the transformation of Republican ideology and his wide-ranging insights about African American politics. In this volume, rather than attempt to extend Foner’s analysis over the entire nation, we instead ask whether a national and international analysis might be based on different framing questions. We step back and ask how, in fact, the Civil War changed the nation. What exactly did the newly invigorated federal government do? Was citizenship the defining way people interacted with that state, or should we look for other ways to characterize people’s relationship with the government? Was the postwar moment the origin of a modern, consolidated nation, or did the United States remain fundamentally inchoate, its regions anarchic and chaotic, its modes of governance fundamentally illiberal?

We hope this volume spurs conversation about issues and concerns that cross conventional historical and historiographical boundaries in the period that spans roughly 1865 to the dawn of the twentieth century. By thinking broadly of a postwar era and by asking where it is located and where it ends, we hope to discover new connections between western, southern, and northeastern story lines. We may find new stories altogether, in new settings and told by new characters speaking new words. We may place the United States alongside other postwar nations instead of treating its postconflict moment as a historically unique response to a historically unique civil war. We follow the Americans of the time, who looked to past and contemporary postwar periods in Europe, Asia, and North Africa to understand the challenges the United States faced.

A STOCKADE STATE

This volume particularly emphasizes the shape, size, and power of the U.S. government. The essays collected here reveal the U.S. government as less a Yankee Leviathan than a Stockade State, a collection of outposts—both military and civilian—powerful within narrow geographical boundaries but limited in their reach, sometimes capable of enforcing their will, sometimes overpowered, and almost always beset by both competing power centers and individuals who sought to live beyond the reach of most authority. The authors’ sensitivity to the government’s enduring vulnerability represents a break from prevailing scholarship on Reconstruction, which has often assumed that the state could ultimately have asserted its will over society. Early pro-southern scholarship viewed federal power in the South as overwhelming and malignant. As the historical literature changed, however, the presumption of federal power did not. Writing after the Second World War, many liberal historians assumed that the post-Civil War federal government could have done what it wished and looked for the political, legal, financial, and constitutional factors that limited it.⁵

By contrast, the essays in this collection see the government less in terms of its constitutional prerogatives than in its concrete forms.⁶ They depict a state threatened not only by constitutional limitations and political conflict but also by its constituent members, a government less self-restrained than besieged by forces it could not control. The federal government thus appears not as the ultimate arbiter of authority—a vision that may have seemed natural in the context of both Cold War foreign policy and civil rights-era jurisprudence—but as one among many forces scrambling for influence and authority. By seeing the government this way, these essays aim to open new ways of thinking about the postwar world. The battle between state and society, they show, was one the Civil War transformed but did not finally determine.

There can be no doubt that the war brought about a moment of significant rethinking of American governance, the proper role of centralized power, the meaning of citizenship, and the status of individuals within the nation. Such ferment is clear not just in the postwar constitutional amendments and the federal legislation that accompanied them but also in the creation of entirely new agencies, some fleeting—like the Freedmen’s Bureau and the Department of Education—and others lasting, including the Justice Department. Even as the War Department sent Civil War volunteers home and Congress cut the military budget, the army attained a newly powerful role in many places. Military officers organized and oversaw the first biracial elections in the South, and in some areas detachments of soldiers remained well into the 1870s. Meanwhile, the army continued its campaigns to contain Native Americans, opening the trans-Mississippi West to railroad construction and white settlement. In both the South and the West, army interventions sparked intense debates about government’s proper size, cost, and role. Many Americans condemned governance by force rather than consent, but federal officials were often frustrated by the army’s incapacity, its limited size, and its dispersal across vast lands.

Policymakers and social reformers, inspired by liberal visions of freedom and citizenship, attempted newly sweeping efforts to assimilate people they considered racially and culturally different. Drawing on ideas implicit in Republican ideology from the party’s founding, policymakers envisioned a nation composed of free and independent individuals capable of entering into contracts, owning land, and raising families. Their liberal worldview generally suggested that people who did not at present appear to live up to those ideals could learn them if properly taught. That belief gave rise to a range of policies—some more coercive, some more voluntaristic—such as primary and secondary schools for freedpeople and Native Americans; worldwide missionary work; and a new Indian policy that rejected treaty making and relied, instead, on incorporation. In the South and the West alike, the Republican fantasy was a nation of free people under federal power, insurgent groups subdued, and racial and cultural outliers brought into the fold through what might today be called soft power.⁷

Western historians, for good reason, often bristle at the suggestion that the Civil War was the fulcrum of national development and rightly point out continuities in white settler expansion and Indian resistance. Yet the wartime growth of the national government transformed the West as well. In Indian Territory, as Barbara Krauthamer demonstrates, the federal government’s actions to end slavery went hand in hand with efforts to expand national sovereignty over Native lands. After the war, spiraling conflicts between white settlers and Plains Indians, spurred by an increased flow of emigrants west during and after the war, led the federal government to stop making treaties with Native American tribes. No longer would Native American groups be treated as domestic dependent nations, as Chief Justice John Marshal had called them in 1831. As C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa shows, the change in policy marked a significant (if ambiguous) step toward a vision of Indians as members of the national body politic. As Stacey L. Smith demonstrates, the federal government’s new stance against slavery also extended outward into the far West, where it came into conflict with long-standing practices of peonage in New Mexico and, ironically, provided a powerful new framework for the anti-Chinese movement.

Yet the aspiration to govern was not the same as actually governing. Post-Civil War political leaders faced real obstacles to creating the nation they envisioned, including lack of will, lack of capacity, and outright resistance. As historians have amply shown, the Republican Party that dominated Congress and the presidency for years after the war was internally divided over taxation, the relative powers of the states and the federal government, and the potential for transcending racial and cultural divisions in efforts to create a unified American nation.⁸ Congressional Republicans argued over appropriate policies toward both the rebel states and Indians even as they sustained unparalleled party unity when confronted with tests to their authority from the White House or the Supreme Court. Yet the most intense attack on the Republicans’ newly expansive visions of government came not from within the party but from outside. Democrats, never relegated to the sidelines, proved adept at reading the changing political situation. By raising fears of a standing army, a tyrannical central state, high tax rates, and racial equality, Democrats quickly regained popularity among white northern voters, even as they retained the loyalty of old southern Democrats and acquired the support of old southern Whigs. From the beginning, then, the Republican goal of constructing a powerful central state was avidly contested.

Then there was lack of capacity. Even in situations where the contours of federal policy seem clear, the government often proved unable to follow through. When the Justice Department sent agents to the South to enforce the Civil Rights Acts of 1870 and 1871, for example, those men faced white communities unwilling to cooperate with investigations, witnesses who refused to testify, and juries that would not convict under any circumstances. In Washington, there was no money to put more soldiers or civilian officials on the ground. The federal judges and commissioners crucial to any effort to enforce federally protected rights were often isolated in cities and inaccessible to the rural population. Most freedpeople therefore had no access to the only officers who could help them. Committed officeholders regularly faced obstacles they simply could not overcome. As Smith shows in this volume, federal rulings about the illegality of peonage in New Mexico fell short not because of ideological contradiction or political betrayal, but because the United States was simply not powerful or present enough to assert itself over a vast, distant, and newly conquered territory, no matter what Congress wrote or judges ruled. On the Great Plains, the U.S. Army enjoyed victories but often found it lacked the personnel or capacity to hold them. For years, besieged outposts faced hostile Native groups and disdainful white settlers, and detachments of soldiers chased rebellious bands across enormous territories at great cost. In Indian Territory, as Krauthamer’s essay demonstrates, the government struggled to enforce black freedom against Indians reluctant to surrender sovereignty. So, too, as Stephen Kantrowitz shows, did Ho-Chunks and other stray bands of Native Americans find it possible to defy federal laws and to remain in place even after they were ostensibly removed. Across the nation, the government did not, in fact, have the organizational structures or staff necessary to execute its policies.⁹

What defined the era, then, was not just the federal government’s new reach but the ways people on the ground—southern freedpeople and rebels, western settlers and Indians—managed to deflect or even overthrow its efforts. White southerners’ resistance is perhaps best known, and it is most evident here in Kidada E. Williams’s powerful analysis of African Americans’ descriptions of their feelings and behavior in the wake of terrorist attacks. But it was only one of many examples. Despite the Civil War’s seemingly transformative effects, the inhabitants of the United States continued practices long familiar to them, heedless of new policies emanating from Washington and of the federal officials who occasionally appeared in their midst. The widespread refusal of many people to accommodate themselves to government policies in turn stretched the government and diminished its sovereignty. In this light, rebels’ ability to stave off federal encroachment in the former Confederacy no longer seems surprising. Instead, they were simply the most powerful, organized, and politically incorporated of the many groups seeking to restrain federal intervention in their locales. The United States still seemed—from the center—distinctly ungoverned, perhaps ungovernable.

By envisioning a dynamic and powerful state whose capacities were nonetheless extremely limited, we begin to catch glimpses of the crucial role of cultural continuity in shaping the postwar era. The Stockade State could place limits on cultural expression—but only within its sight. The state ended, as Luke E. Harlow shows, at the church house doors. Behind them, white southern religious leaders and their congregations produced unifying narratives of righteousness and triumph that strengthened, rather than collapsed, in the face of political change. For K. Stephen Prince, northerners’ self-satisfied view of the natural superiority of their way of life led them to expect that defeated white southerners would embrace northern ideals. To many northerners’ surprise, however, white southerners did not live among ruins, but instead began to rebuild their surroundings and their societies. Agents of the Stockade State remained, often hunkered down in geographical and political outposts like forts and courthouses, claiming intense authority over narrow bands of space but nearly powerless in the countryside. Unable to regulate or even to see what lay beyond its walls, this federal government aimed to perform its power without risking defeat, as white settlers, ex-Confederates, corporations, Indians, and freedpeople acted not in deference but in defiance.

AN ILLIBERAL LAND?

Recognizing the limits of Washington’s power does not mean dismissing the federal government as irrelevant. As the essays in this volume show, the struggle between national aspiration and local resistance is crucial precisely because it helps us think in new ways about the forms of liberal thought that emerged from this period and the extent to which they filtered into American life. Questions about the future of chattel slavery had been at the heart of the Civil War, and as the war ended, slavery’s antithesis—freedom—became the subject of significant struggle. Historians have picked up on this, analyzing as struggles over the meanings of freedom such phenomena as freedpeople’s postwar organizing, debates about labor and wages in the South, the creation of national citizenship through the Fourteenth Amendment, and top-down efforts to assimilate former slaves and Native Americans. Historians have also shown how questions of freedom roiled an industrializing northern society in which an increasingly self-conscious elite insisted that freedom meant little more than the ability to sign one’s name to an employment contract and where growing multitudes would spend their lives in drudgery. It is clear that nineteenth-century Americans used the language of freedom to many different ends—to liberate but also to limit and coerce.¹⁰

Yet leaning on freedom as an analytical category, even in such nuanced ways, carries limitations of its own. The concept of freedom aligns easily with liberal values of individual autonomy, contract, and choices unconstrained by institutions. Orienting historical analysis around questions of freedom thus tends to marginalize certain crucial aspects of post-Civil War history, especially the violence and enduring local power relations that made it impossible for the federal government to enforce its own policies or persuade people to accept the principles behind them. Persistently illiberal conditions, rather than odd anomalies to a liberal order, may well constitute the center of a postwar history defined in Smith’s essay and in Steven Hahn’s afterword less around freedom than around coercion. Or perhaps, as Williams suggests, an emancipation defined not by claims to rights but by brutal violence whose effect was to traumatize and dispossess. We concede that no liberal state is capable of creating a perfectly rationalized system of governance; it would be misleading to judge any era against that ideal. Yet given the persistence and ubiquity of violence, lawlessness, and coercive labor practices, we think it important to ask: Were illiberal forms of power in fact the norm, not the exception, in the post-Civil War era?¹¹

To ask such a question is not to suggest that the rise of a national vision of freedom and basic rights made no difference. To the contrary, some aspects of the Republican program were integrated remarkably quickly into the nation’s political culture. As Amy Dru Stanley shows, the abolition of slavery opened the door to a wide-ranging debate about fundamental human rights in which African Americans and their white allies made the bold claim—enshrined in the 1875 Civil Rights Act—that all people were entitled not only to pursue a livelihood or to take a case to court but also to spend their money how and where they chose and to enjoy the pleasures of the theater and other public amusements. Yet Republican ideals and legislation could also be brought to bear against the further spread of racial equality and inclusiveness. As Smith shows, for example, Democrats who had earlier opposed the Thirteenth Amendment soon found its categorical rejection of slavery useful in their struggle against Chinese immigration.

At the same time, Republican efforts to construct a racially neutral liberalism, while successful in discrediting some forms of racial discrimination, did not—and were not intended to—stymie other kinds of inequality. The liberal assimilationist policies the government developed for Indians became crucial instruments for dispossessing tribes of their land and power. Political leaders and civic reformers developed new arguments for discrimination and marginalization, including formally color-blind—but in fact racially directed—laws disfranchising southern freedpeople. New and ostensibly scientific ideas about racial difference came into circulation, and Americans mobilized them against not only longtime denizens of the nation but multitudes of new immigrants. The rise of liberal rhetoric, then, did not signal widespread recognition of the dignity and autonomy of every individual.

The ascent of liberal individualism and freedom of contract has sometimes seemed the sine qua non of the postwar period, but the new vision of a frustrated state suggests a less exalted, more pragmatic understanding of rights.¹² Drawing on her influential work on how visions of a corporate peace shaped local legal practices in the early national period, Laura F. Edwards captures how local forms of justice survived national efforts to reconfigure rights.¹³ As her essay shows, Republicans’ attempts to institute a regime of individual rights pushed up against existing forms of communal order that retained their power and utility after the war. In this context, people claimed rights based more on pragmatic assessments of what they thought would work than on a deep, principled commitment. Kantrowitz’s Ho-Chunk exemplify this complex relationship between state and subject. Beset by laws that aimed to remove them to the Dakotas and then to Nebraska, they asserted that they had become sedentary farmers and claimed individual land titles. Yet they cared about fulfilling the government’s vision of civilization only insofar as it helped them avoid forced relocation. Given the unusual nature of the stray bands, it is tempting to see theirs as a purely exceptional response, but in fact, people across the nation at once grasped for and leaned away from individual rights. Whether they were self-consciously antiliberal or lived in ignorance of liberalism or simply did not believe a liberal order had arrived, their actions help us map out the endurance of competing visions of power in the postwar era.

Meanwhile, the federal government simply could not create a rationalized, legalistic order on the ground. Many of the present essays, like other recent work on the era, place violence at the center of the postwar world. They suggest that rather than a nation of rights undermined by inevitable flashes of violence, the postwar United States was perhaps a nation ruled by violence interrupted by flashes of rights. Night riders attacked former slaves, sparing neither women nor children; whites rioted against Chinese mine workers in Wyoming; New Mexican Hispanos tried to prevent federal officials from freeing their peons; white settlers attacked the Nez Percé in Oregon; and black settlers displaced Native Americans in Indian Territory. Rather than exceptional individual incidents, such moments provide a window into the everyday violence that shaped many communities. New access to the federal state could not stave off, or perhaps even slow, the violence that permeated the South and the West during this period, as local governments proved unable or unwilling to step in. As Williams shows, there was in fact no peace. In her chilling portrayal of postemancipation trauma, violence structured everyone’s life even in the moments when it was not occurring, its psychic wounds and economic consequences extending long after the physical injuries healed.

Understanding the growth of both federal power and individual rights in the twentieth century, it is hard not to look backward to find their traces in the post-Civil War era. Some narratives conceive the world the Civil War made as an incomplete, emerging variant of a mostly benevolent contemporary liberalism. Others use the period’s limitations and ascriptions to expose the violence and hierarchies inherent in liberalism itself. We agree that liberalism may be, in different ways and in different moments, benevolent, coercive, hierarchical, or equalizing. Yet we are after something different: What happens if we think of the postwar world less as a precursor to what is to come, and more as a jumble of surprisingly open-ended and often illiberal practices? By attempting to stand in the moment itself, instead of looking back with the knowledge of what happened later, we ask whether citizenship, individual rights, and federal authority actually defined the era, and we consider the extent to which Americans continued to experience a world shaped by intimate, personalized power and violence deep into the postwar years.

WAS THE POSTWAR WORLD A NEW WORLD AFTER ALL?

How did the Civil War change the nation? The answer to this question remains surprisingly elusive. However much scholars might reject the historical account offered by D. W. Griffith’s famous film, the idea of the Civil War as the birth of the nation echoes through much scholarship on the postwar years. And there is good reason to see the roots of the twentieth-century United States planted deep within the postwar order. The defeat of the slaveholders’ rebellion, the concomitant rise of a new national elite, and the volatile period of economic growth that followed the war have captured the attention of historians looking for the origins of what some have called the American century. Likewise, the political mobilization of freedpeople after emancipation, the unfulfilled promises of a biracial working-class movement, and synergy between grassroots mobilization and legislative change in Washington have suggested connections with the twentieth-century civil rights movement and produced powerful narratives of tragedy, irony, and deferral. In both historical and popular discussion, then, the postwar period has frequently served important political purposes. As Edwards argues, the postwar moment has often taken on an outsized role in national consciousness, used as evidence of what the country could be, or what it must not be, or what it could have been, or what prevents it from becoming something better than it is.

Yet looking backward for the origins of the twentieth-century state risks blinding us to the historical distinctiveness of the post-Civil War United States. It may be tempting to imagine that the twentieth-century national state, an intensely legalistic and powerful hegemon atop a thoroughly capitalist society, had its birth in the triumph of the liberal, bourgeois nationalist Republican Party of the 1860s. As the essays in this volume suggest, however, the nation that emerged after the Civil War was not a Cold War state with training wheels. Rather than using the period as a kind of oracular mirror, the essays offer something more akin to a window into a distant world. They take the transformative nature of the Civil War era as a question, not an assumption. Instead of the moment the United States became modern, the postwar years appear in these essays a period of both massive change and intense continuity.

The possibility of continuity across the Civil War is not new. Economic historians, in particular, have long debated how transformative the Civil War was and whether it spurred the growth of industrial capitalism. From the perspective of southern and African American history, some historians have suggested that war and emancipation did not meaningfully change the larger trajectory of class relations or racial oppression, while others have shown how postwar black politics had roots in antebellum slave communities.¹⁴ In this volume, Harlow finds continuity in the rich field of religious culture. Behind church doors, white Protestants defended their vison of distinct and enduring southern Christian values. Northerners, like those portrayed in Prince’s essay, may have hoped to find the South ready to be made anew, but many southern ministers believed northern Christians heretics for doubting slavery’s righteousness. Slavery itself had vanished, but race remained a bridge of continuity as white southerners—but also northerners—asserted the enduring power of a white man’s democracy. Crystal N. Feimster shows that African American women took advantage of new opportunities offered by the war and the Republican ascendancy to draw attention to their experiences of sexual violation by white men and to insist that they were entitled to dignity and bodily integrity. Yet the broad chronological scope of her essay reveals that their actions were part of much longer quest for sexual justice that dated to before the war and would continue long after it.

As most historians know well, parsing the rhetoric and reality of continuity versus change can be difficult. Sometimes people’s claims to be doing what they have always done are reliable; other times they lend cover to new practices. Conversely, declarations of a new policy or approach may in fact be window dressing for more of the same. Amanda Claybaugh’s essay shows how literary representations of Washington, D.C., evolved as writers grappled with a federal government whose size and scope had changed dramatically. In the 1870s and 1880s, writers’ overtly critical stance against Republican policies shifted easily into seemingly nonpolitical or antipolitical writing that accepted and naturalized a sense of disdain for those who lived and worked in the national capital. Within a few years, an enduring and politicized skepticism of centralized government had been refitted and rearticulated for a new moment.

If continuity emerges as one theme of this volume, meaningful and even revolutionary change is another. Looking both southward and across the ocean to Europe, Andrew Zimmerman makes the transformative nature of the Civil War startlingly clear as he captures its power for European radicals. Rather than regarding it as a bourgeois revolution, much less a moment of continuity, Karl Marx saw the Civil War as a new way to understand what revolution was. Disconcertingly for American historians, Marx interpreted the Civil War not as the American version of the revolutions of 1848 but as an essentially new form, one that superseded failed European models and provided new hope for the world’s workers. And Stanley argues that the Congress that passed the 1875 Civil Rights Act, whose members included former slaves and free African Americans, revolutionized human rights when it enshrined in federal law a right to enjoy public amusements. If such steps toward democracy and the recognition of human dignity were tenuous and subject to reversal (and they certainly were), they would have been inconceivable before the Civil War.

On the question of continuity and change, as on the precise nature of the postwar state or the exact balance between liberalism and illiberalism, this collection cannot offer final answers. Instead we aim to open up new questions, fresh ways of asking about the people, institutions, and ideas that shaped a crucial era. These questions will, we hope, point to as-yet-unrealized possibilities for transnational, comparative, and global history. While historians of emancipation have long looked to the Caribbean, South America, and Africa for comparisons, an emphasis on the travails of governing opens possibilities for envisioning the postwar period alongside other imperial expansions and state consolidations. It is easy to imagine comparative histories of postwar periods that place the transformation of the United States in constructive dialogue with contemporary experiences in India, Algeria, Hungary, Poland, Mexico, and many other sites of midcentury struggle.

It is a daunting and therefore exciting time to write the history of the post-Civil War United States. In trying to record the ways the war echoed through the postwar years, the essays in this volume range widely across the national landscape and through various modes of historical research and writing. The authors have not only described the path and pitch of the echoes but have also asked about their origins and implications. These essays reveal new possibilities for imagining government, claims-making, and narrative. They show that vital questions remain about this era, but they by no means capture the full range of answers. We hope to see historians venture well beyond any boundaries implied in this volume, asking increasingly global questions, looking westward across the Pacific and southward to the Americas. We also hope they will go further than these essays in incorporating and shaping the scholarship on the history of the nineteenth-century military and the development of capitalism. In all these areas, and in others whose sounds are yet too faint to be heard or too strange to be recognized, the Civil War resonated across the nation and beyond it.

NOTES

1. The postwar period of Reconstruction has produced some of the finest histories and historiographical essays of any period in U.S. history. The standard overview of Reconstruction historiography remains Eric Foner, Reconstruction Revisited, Reviews in American History 10 (December 1982): 82–100. For other historiographical overviews, see, Introduction, and Eric Foner, Afterword, in After Slavery: Race, Labor, and Citizenship in the Reconstruction South, ed. Bruce E. Baker and Brian Kelly (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2013), 1–15, 221–30; Aaron Sheehan-Dean, The Long Civil War: The Historiography of the Consequences of the Civil War, Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 119 (2011): 106–53; Brian Kelly, Emancipations and Reversals: Labor, Race, and the Boundaries of American Freedom in the Age of Capital, International Labor and Working-Class History 75 (Spring 2009): 169–83; Bruce E. Baker, What Reconstruction Meant: Historical Memory in the American South (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007); Thomas J. Brown, Reconstructions: New Perspectives on the Postbellum United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Alex Lichtenstein, Was the Emancipated Slave a Proletarian? Reviews in American History 26 (March 1998): 124–45; Michael Les Benedict, Preserving the Constitution: The Conservative Basis of Radical Reconstruction, Journal of American History 61 (June 1974): 65–90; Kenneth Stampp, The Tragic Legend of Reconstruction, in The Era of Reconstruction (New York: Vintage, 1967), 3–23; Howard K. Beale, On Rewriting Reconstruction History, American Historical Review 45 (July 1959): 807–27; John Hope Franklin, Whither Reconstruction Historiography, Journal of Negro Education (Fall 1948): 446–61; A. A. Taylor, Historians of the Reconstruction, Journal of Negro History 23 (January 1938): 16–34; and W. E. B. Du Bois, Reconstruction and Its Benefits, American Historical Review 15 (July 1910): 781–99.

2. Recent scholars have done crucial work in tying together southern and western history during the Civil War era, especially Elliott West, The Last Indian War: The Nez Perce Story (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Elliott West, Reconstructing Race, Western Historical Quarterly 34 (Spring 2003): 6–26; Heather Cox Richardson, West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America after the Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008); Adam Arenson, The Great Heart of the Republic: St. Louis and the Cultural Civil War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011); C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa, Crooked Paths to Allotment: The Fight over Federal Indian Policy after the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); Stacey L. Smith, Freedom’s Frontier: California and the Struggle over Unfree Labor, Emancipation, and Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013); Barbara Krauthamer, Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013); Steven Hahn, Slave Emancipation, Indian Peoples, and the Projects of a New American Nation State, Journal of the Civil War Era 3 (September 2013): 307–30; and Adam Arenson and Andrew R. Graybill, eds., Civil War Wests: Testing the Limits of the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015).

3. W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction: An Essay toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruction Democracy in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1935).

4. Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper and Row, 1988).

5. The literature is vast, and we cite just a few examples here. Leon Litwack and C. Vann Woodward emphasized northern racism, while Kenneth Stampp, Eric Foner, and Heather Cox Richardson pointed to ideological brakes. Even historians who emphasized the limits of government capacity, including Richard Bensel and Sven Beckert, made that incapacity evidence of ideology, rather than a factor in and of itself. Leon F. Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York: Alfred. A. Knopf, 1979); C. Vann Woodward, particularly in Equality: The Deferred Commitment, in The Burden of Southern History, rev. 3rd ed. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008); Kenneth M. Stampp, The Era of Reconstruction, 1865–1877 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965); Eric Foner, Reconstruction; Heather Cox Richardson, The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Civil War North, 1865–1901 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004); Richard Franklin Bensel, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–1877 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); and Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

6. The works in this collection share with recent scholarship in American Political Development (APD) an interest in the size and shape of the nineteenth-century state. While William Novak, Brian Balogh, and others have turned from the weakness of the nineteenth-century state to its surprising strengths, especially at the local level in Novak’s analysis, we return to the central question of the weaknesses and paradoxes of the federal government. A crucial early work is Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982). Recent work on the actual administrative capacities of the nineteenth-century federal government that is either part of the APD school or influenced by it includes Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992); Richard R. John, Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995); William J. Novak, The People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Sarah Barringer Gordon, The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Mark R. Wilson, The Business of Civil War: Military Mobilization and the State, 1861–1865 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006); Brian Balogh, A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Stephen J. Rockwell, Indian Affairs and the Administrative State in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); and Cathleen D. Cahill, Federal Fathers and Mothers: A Social History of the United States Indian Service, 1869–1933 (Chapel Hill; University of North Carolina Press, 2011).

7. Some of these points are powerfully explicated in Cahill, Federal Fathers and Mothers, 15–59. How reformers and officials directed assimilationist attitudes toward freedpeople is described in scholarship on the Freedmen’s Bureau and on freedmen’s education. Recent work has given special emphasis to the domestic and gendered aspirations of those efforts. See, for example, Mary Farmer-Kaiser, Freedwomen and the Freedmen’s Bureau: Race, Gender, and Public Policy in the Age of Emancipation (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010); Kate Masur, An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle over Equality in Washington (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 51–86; and Catherine Jones, Intimate Reconstructions: Children in Postemancipation Virginia (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015). Apart from Cahill, the literatures on the South and West remain largely unconnected.

8. See, especially, Michael Les Benedict, A Compromise of Principle: Congressional Republicans and Reconstruction, 1863–1869 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1974).

9. John Hope Franklin and LaWanda and John Cox a half century ago emphasized deep, inherent limits in federal enforcement: John Hope Franklin, Reconstruction after the Civil War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961) and LaWanda C. Fenlason Cox and John H. Cox, Politics, Principle, and Prejudice, 1865–1866: The Dilemma of Reconstruction America (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1963). Robert Kaczorowski explored the limits